Digital Reputation Management with SEO, Social Media & PR

One of the hottest topics that transcends the public relations, social media and search marketing worlds is online reputation management. Search engines are fantastic for finding things. They’re also a significant contributor to influence online. Blogs, forums, social networks and media sharing sites all offer venues for customers to express their opinions about brands – good and bad.

The influence of search visibility as well as word of mouth on social media sites (the social web) is too significant for companies with any kind of brand equity to ignore. Lucky for readers of this blog or those you pass it on to, there are two upcoming opportunities to learn in depth about how to tackle online reputation management.

I’ll get to those opportunities in a moment, but first I’ll offer some context for why this is such an important issue.

There are plenty of CEOs, executives, brand and business managers that are facing the dilemma of what to do about their company and brand reputation online. Some have been oblivious and have no real idea what customers and the marketplace are saying about their brands. Some are dealing with motivated dissenters blogging about negative issues and soliciting followers. Yet others are experiencing another kind of energetic consumer – evangelists.

Dealing with each situation is different and from conversations I’ve had will companies and other digital marketing consultants, most companies have no idea what to do. Online Marketing Blog has outlined the key considerations for dealing with search and online reputation management issues in the past which is a good primer. Judging by the growth rate of the social web (Facebook 10 million new users per month) in terms of adoption and new social communication/connection tools, the effect of social media on corporate, brand and even consumer reputations is not going away anytime soon.

Companies like Kryptonite Locks, Comcast, Dell, Walmart and Sony have all experienced what it’s like to ignore the influence of the social web and the subsequent effect on how their brands are reflected, both in the search results and within social media channels. These are classic examples that have been well documented, which is one reason why they persist in the search results. Some like Dell and Comcast have learned and acted on their observations, becoming case studies for how companies can engage customers on the social web.

Any company publishing content online or that has customers engaging with content online (producing, interacting or just reading) is a candidate for an online reputation management effort. That covers just about every company in business, don’t you think?

Don’t wait until somebody decides to launch a “yourbrandsucks.com” site because by the time a web site ranks well in the search results for your company’s brand names, you’ll be hard pressed to compete. It’s possible and will take both time and expense. It’s much better to be proactive about your online reputation management.

As with all things involving social media, the first step is listening. To find those dissenting and evangelizing customers early on and before they have a major impact, it’s impotant to implement a social media monitoring effort. This also includes monitoring search results on different types of search engines. There are plenty of tools to do this ranging from Google Alerts to Trackur to Radian6.

In the course of listening, those opinion makers and their followers will become evident and the task of qualifying current and future influentials will be an important next step. Some companies have enough community management staff to address nearly every concern they come across. A great example is what H&R Block and Zappos are doing by listening on Twitter.

Dissenters can be engaged by customer support staff and evangelists are often engaged by marketing staff. Other situations might necessitate legal, PR or product experts. The process of listening, qualifying and engaging opinionated customers online presents tremendous learning opportunity for companies that want to champion communicating on the social web.

A SEO-centric and proactive approach to search repuation management involves monitoring both search listings and social media, optimizing and promoting content in more locations than just your own domain name, analyze the effect of your efforts and refine as necessary.

You might be reading this and thinking this is all fine and good, but you really want to sink your teeth into the topic with some actionable advice and a clear plan on what to do next. Lucky you, there are two such opportunities coming up quickly that will offer examples, tools and advice.

From a search perspective, there’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon coming up next week, where Andy Beal of MarketingPilgim / Trackur, Ted Murphy of IZEA, Jessica Berlin of Cirque du Soleil and myself will be presenting on a panel called “Reputation Monitoring and Management”. There we’ll deal with the SEO aspects of reputation management along with monitoring and how SEO and PR can be used as a proactive measure in dealing with reputation issues within search.

The second opportunity to learn more about online reputation management comes in the form of a workshop called, “Social Media Smarts” in New York December 4th & 5th. The DMA has partnered with TopRank Online Marketing to offer an intensive introduction to the world of social media from a marketing perspective including advice and case studies dealing with online reputation management issues. Visit the DMA social media seminar site for more information on the workshop.

I hope to see you at one of these two events and for those that have urgent questions please comment or email and I’ll connect with you. Also, I’m always looking for good social media case studies. If you have a great story with references I can point to online, please share in the comments.

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@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on integrated content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely on a beach somewhere doing absolutely nothing.

Lee, I really liked this post. I’m been thinking some of the same things and wrote up an analysis of how online reputation of Google’s products are really amplified by online social media and SEO techniques that they use. I was really surprised that their efforts had resulted in 450,000 unique blog posts in 60 days. There must be tens of millions of views on blogs mentioning Google Chrome out there. If you have time, check out the post. I would really like your comments.

We see going “green” and environmental stewardship on an almost equal footing with corporate reputation, and quickly becoming one of the strongest currencies among supporters of social justice and corporate responsibility. Our firm has expanded our metrics to include the monitoring of eco-topics, specifcally those discussions which are impressing or angering Web audiences. We call this the

Elliot, thanks for sharing. I just posted a blog about the importance of being “Ad-Keen”, and why online marketplace and classified sites are important to include in any brand and online reputation monitoring strategy.

Indeed an Interesting blog! I totally agree with you when you say that social media is “a significant contributor to influence online”. In fact, we at EmPower Research (www.empowerresearch.com) have helped many clients in tracking and analyzing user generated media.
According to a recent MarketTools report, 70% of US adults visit blogs, social networks, online communities or other forms of social media. Hence, in my personal opinion, companies can create a great reputation for themselves, if they leverage social media tactically.

I totally agree- every company is a candidate for online reputation management. There are so many conversations going on online, some are bound to be about your company or industry. But, like you said, some businesses are totally oblivious to the fact that anything is being said. That’s why we started a buzz marketing company that get businesses involved in online conversations.

I wish I were getting out of the city to listen to you speak at PubCon, Lee. But I’m tucked away in Boston for the time being.

I think that you are making a strong point that businesses need to pay attention to what others are saying about them, especially when it comes to negative blog posts that are harmful if not responded to correctly and quickly.

We’re creating a way to track that at Vibemetrix and track your interaction with bloggers. It’s been a lot of hard work but we hope to make it better for companies to see what’s going on with their products and reach out to bloggers that are evangelists as well as step into any negative situations that result.

I agree 100% with the article. One thing i keep hearing about though is the following “social media is the next big thing in marketing and SEO”, well I got some news for them, social media is not the ‘next’ big thing, it IS ALREADY the big thing!

Im currently the CEO of a company called Websites R Us, we do website design and SEO and the very 1st thing we do in SEO is social media!

The takeaway from most ORM discourse is that if you keep a clean bill of record, you mitigate brand assualt. Taking this line of thinking to extreme irrationallity, if someone registers a gripe site (brandXYZsucks.com), then your company probably should have taken its head of the sand sooner.

However, there are always exceptions to the rule, and even the best run companies will have its share of critics. Similar to a title-holder in boxing, everyone wants a shot at exposing your Achilles’ heel, and the same applies with those who carry strong brand and repuation currencies. The harshest and savviest critics, more often than not, tend to understand the ease of access that free tools can provide in terms of reaching audiences, and how to mobilize online support.

I’ve written a few tips that expand on the topic of brand assault in the past that might be of some use, however even if you are successful in tracking newly created URL’s or domains, you need to devise an approach that explores the full spectrum.

For instance, while a dot com may still be one of the most attractive choices for those intent on petitioning an anti-brand campaign to Web audiences, the monitoring strategy ought to be comprehensive enough to include along with all the intentionally mispelt domain names, all the free-blogging platforms (i.e. brandXYZ.blogspot.com), Twitter and MySpace urls, spoofed IP’s, text/word ad tracking (how else are they going to get people to find them) just to name a few, as the social aspects of the Web can carry just as much steam and generate similar if not greater attention in terms of search rank.

Ultimately, I view this as being part of an overall brand and reputation monitoring strategy, and an equally important aspect of staying on top of new online incidents.

Thanks Joseph for your response. It’s certainly an exciting problem for marketers and PR professionals to solve. My mind boggles at the cost of preemptively registering all the potential mispellings for your core domain name. The added expense of owning BRANDsucks.com or BRANDstinks.com or whatever have you is also very daunting.

Thanks for the article…it’s really insightful and puts a spin on the Online Reputation Management articles I’ve read recently. It’s amazing really that this topic has been of such importance for so long, but it is still taking some of the big brands a long time before they realise they need to partake in the conversation if they want to stop the negative ones.

You mention Dell and Comcast as great case studies for learning from their mistakes…do you have any more information/resources on these cases? I’d be interested to learn all about them.

But the way you’ve outlined SEO and social media together here is what’s really important. As a company in Ireland, the convergence of the two is still new…but we are actively providing social media solutions for all of our SEO clients.

Hi,
Thank you Lee for a great post and thank you all for the interesting comments. I wanted to add the personal online reputation management aspect to the discussion and hopefully get your feedback re it’s link to business ORM. We have developed an ORM tool to help individuals and businesses to promote, manage and control their online reputation in an easy and cost effective manner. our tool’s name is http://www.lookuppage.com and we’re serving over 40,000 users of which more them 50% are from the UK. Setting up your own LookupPage is free, and there are additional services such as a private domain name, page visitors statistics and a guaranteed top placement across all leading search engines using PPC for a fee.
We thing our tool is an integral part of any reputation management campaign and welcome all of you to test it – its free!
Cheers, E. Furman